PHP is great, but you need to be a pretty decent developer to use it effectively. It has a rather nice interactive shell, https://psysh.org/ https://psysh.org/

PHP is great, but you need to be a pretty decent developer to use it effectively. It has a rather nice interactive shell, https://psysh.org/ https://psysh.org/ . I've built non-trivial, non-web systems in it. Concurrency 'within' the language isn't as nice as some alternatives, but the FCGI-style deployment is quite reliable and convenient in practice.